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Monthly Archives: August 2016

First thing to get out of the way: yes, I do have not only one, but two, cats named Consubstantial. Originally one Consubstantial had a different name but since it’s so hard to tell the two apart, they somehow both became Consubstantial. Consubstantial 1, in the picture, used to be the friendlier one. But now Consubstantial 2 is also mostly friendly. Except yesterday when she slapped her own kitten for standing too close to her.

The Consubstantials, often called Connies for short, are both barn cats and both have kittens this year. And so both are living in the house so the kittens get socialized. But Connie 1 has been having some problems. She got very scrawny nursing kittens this year— perhaps because Connie 2 and another barn cat, Charybdis, had kittens about the same time and everyone’s nursing one another’s kittens.

Connie 1 also has been having ‘digestive issues’ but otherwise seemed healthy. Until a couple of nights ago when a noise woke me up, and I discovered Connie 1 was having a seizure. When it was over, she slept for a while and then jumped in my lap for attention which she never does.

We weren’t able to discover why Connie 1 had the seizure but my guess is possible dehydration, since she’s nursing a lot of kittens and her ‘digestive issues’ are playing a part. I tried feeding her some yogurt. She likes it but it hasn’t fixed the ‘issues.’ So after doing a little research I decided to give her one of my probiotic pills, crushed up. After the first time her ‘issues’ improved, so I am optimistic that she will continue to get better.

Connie 1 nursing kittens. Not her own kittens.

This is a post in the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop. Click on the link and you will either find out more about the Celebrate the Small Things blog hop, or the universe will explode.

Right now my number one priority in my writing life is getting back on a strict ketogenic (low-carb) diet. Because I just am not able to write when my health is very bad.

My ketogenic diet changes me from a person with chronic fatigue— to the point I have to sit down and rest after the exertion of getting dressed in the morning— to a person with energy. It controls my blood sugar without drugs. It makes me less depressed and more optimistic. And it helps me with some of the issues from my autism spectrum disorder.

But when I’m off the diet, I’m hungry and also have cravings for carb foods. And I don’t have any energy for making healthy meals, so the bad diet and low energy, high blood sugar and depression goes on and on and on….

I need to get back my enthusiasm for eating healthy in order to do ANYTHING. And so I’ve resolved to begin my day by listening to a ketogenic diet podcast. And luckily there are some very good ones available from Jimmy Moore, a well-known ketogenic diet advocate who used to weigh 410 pounds.

Listening to the podcasts gives me enthusiasm for sticking to my diet. This morning after listening to one of Jimmy Moore’s podcasts, I got out my ketogenic diet recipe book and made some low-carb/ketogenic bread. It’s about .4 gram of carb per slice. I used it to make a sloppy joe sandwich for lunch just now. It was very good!

There’s another good effect to listening to a podcast. Jimmy Moore’s podcasts run about an hour. I listen using an mp3 player and so I can do household chores during that time. I got a whole batch of clothes folded and put away, and started a load of laundry, while listening to Jimmy Moore.

I feel that I have no choice but to establish better dietary habits as my #1 priority right now. Listening to the podcast first thing in the morning means I can’t do my writing first thing in the morning, or my blogging. But I’m keeping the podcast as first priority. Because it’s much harder to write when you are dead, or deathly ill, from illnesses which can be helped by ketogenic diets.

Jimmy Moore’s podcasts can be found at his blog, here: http://livinlavidalowcarb.com/blog/
He has fresh podcasts Monday-Friday with many interesting guests, many of them doctors, nutritionists or researchers.

What is a podcast?

A podcast is like a radio show, only it’s on the internet.

How do you listen to a podcast?

You go to the website that hosts or links to the podcast— like the Jimmy Moore blog listed above. On Jimmy’s blog, each post that is about a podcast gives you several options for listening. Click on the one marked ‘download.’ It will take you to another page where the podcast is playing. You can listen to the podcast on your computer.

If you have an mp3 player, you can right-click on the podcast-playing graphic and it will give you the option to ‘save audio as.’ I have a folder in my ‘music’ folder called ‘Jimmy Moore podcasts.’ That’s where I download to. From there I can put the podcast onto my mp3 player.

It’s the 50th anniversary of Star Trek this year, and I’m celebrating. Since I was 8 years old when the original Star Trek premiered, you can do the math and find out how older-than-dirt I really am.

Why did the original Star Trek work so much better than its television successors or the movies? In large part because the original Star Trek was written for a mass audience. Not only that, a mass audience of the 1960s, when Western television shows that didn’t violate Judeo-Christian values were the most popular form of entertainment, and the three networks had strict rules to keep swearing and sex out of the public’s living rooms.

One thing that made the original Star Trek beloved is that the Enterprise was a military space ship— you can tell by the military ranks and command structure, and the fact that the ship had state-of-the-art weapons and defenses. Military was something that a lot of men in the audience could relate to in 1966. Some had served in World War 2, and others in the Korean War, and military service was something people did proudly. It was not until a bit later that the anti-Vietnam-War movement convinced large segments of the people that military veterans were people to be spat upon.

The original Star Trek gave us an optimistic vision of our future. Perhaps the most optimistic, for me, is the sheer number of times the King James Version of the Bible was quoted by a Star Trek character. Probably unintentionally, Gene Roddenberry let me know there was a place in his future vision for a Christian like me.

Contrast that to the most popular vision of the future we have on the small screen today: The Walking Dead. The message seems to be that if you are one of the lucky few to not become a zombie, you can have a good time killing zombies for a while. Then Negan will beat you to death with his pet ball bat, Lucille. Not my favorite view of the future (though I’m a zombie prepper anyway.)

My own private Star Trek universe:

I’ve been making up stories in my head about starships and the Enterprise crew since about 1966. Still do, some of the time. By the time I was a teen I began to realize that my versions of the Enterprise crew were beginning to drift away from the original concepts.

By the time I became a Serious Writer, I began to think of making a Star Trek universe of my own with characters who belonged to me. In the past couple of years I’ve been working harder on it, and have come up with the Starship Destine universe.

The Starship Destine is at the center of the universe’s stories, so far. It is a massive spherical ship that only rarely lands on a planet. At the core of the ship is a forest— transplanted tree by tree, plant by plant from a forest plot owned by an Amish farm family and sold to the Fleet.

The starships of the Destine’s time are not the massive government funded exploration ships of the Star Trek universe. A major role of the starships is to facilitate interplanetary trade, and to engage in trade themselves to pay the bills.

The starship Destine is a new starship, which was landed on the planet Sackett on the grounds of the Fleet Academy. During an attack on the planet Sackett by unknown forces, cadets and instructors from the Academy and neighboring Amish farmers took refuge on the ship. One almost-graduated cadet, deemed captain of the ship for the purpose of a training exercise, became captain for real when the Destine escaped the attack on Sackett and began a search for surviving Fleet authority figures….

While I have things to celebrate today, my Wildblue internet service is not one of them. I just got told by them that I’m over my usage limit again— even though I gave up Facebook games in order to save bandwidth for my writing career. So I’m unplugging the internet when not in use and getting up early to use my off-peak bandwidth.

But there is good news in my life. First, I made two sales of my poetry book, ‘surly petunia’ on Amazon.com which is a good start there. As you may guess, poetry doesn’t sell well, and ‘quirky’ poetry even less. But I am encouraged.

Next, now that I have decided to devote my efforts to becoming one of the top Amazon.com reviewers in my genre, I am developing methods to create reviews more easily. Mainly I keep a legal pad handy when I read and note down the key points of the book including character names and such. Here are some of my recent reviews:

If you should happen to read any of my reviews — thank you! — and if you happen to think one or more of them is a helpful review for someone deciding whether to buy the book, please click ‘yes’ in the place at the bottom of the review where they ask ‘is this review helpful?’ That would be a big help to me.

And now, the final thing to celebrate— I am surviving the hot weather in spite of my lack of air conditioning. I bought an air conditioner unit but there are difficulties in installing it. It’s hard on me because of my poor health but I am surviving by drinking a lot of ice water and not doing much around the house. Today my big project, besides this blog hop, is doing the laundry. Some of the laundry. Well, maybe one load of laundry and some folding.

The online world demands a lot of reciprocity. If you join a writers’ group on Facebook, and you want people to like and comment on the stuff you post there, you have to like and comment on other people’s stuff. If you want your stuff retweeted on Twitter, you retweet other people’s stuff.

But the biggest part of a writer’s dream is not about reciprocity— it’s about loads and loads of people liking your books and buying them and you not having to buy any books from all of THEM in return. That’s what you have to do to make it as a writer— sell to people including faceless strangers who only know you through your books.

Part of that dream these days is that a decent portion of your readers will write a review and that’s important. But real writers not in the Stephen King category have another source of reviews, and that is a circle of writing friends— the kind of friends you can make in the writers’ groups I mentioned above.

These are two of the groups I’m in— do searches at Facebook to find ones right for you— look for ones with real interactivity going on, not just people posting their books for sale.

Of course sometimes you are caught in a no-reciprocity trap. You write a review for this one, you write a review for that one, you write 2 for that author and 3 for that one— and they never think of reviewing your book in return.

That’s where I am at with my poetry book ‘surly petunia.’ (The title is taken from the first poem I wrote as a serious writer of poetry— amazingly it stood up over time, mainly because it’s weird and funny. Or sad. I can never tell those emotions apart.)

The excuse I get is that it’s POETRY and they don’t know how to read POETRY and review POETRY because, I suspect, they’d rather read someone’s overweight & second-rate fantasy tome than read a few pages of POETRY.

As a person with Asperger Syndrome, I have Special Interests— obsessive/intense interests in a number of topics. My Special Interests include languages, ancient Roman history, The Walking Dead, and Star Trek.

Right now, especially Star Trek. At an intensity that’s a distraction from my writing work. Which is an on-going problem— it’s hard to plot and write the story I’m supposed to be working on when my mind is buzzing away at a Special Interest.

When I am feeling a Special Interest very intensely, it takes up more of my time. Because my Star Trek interest has been at the top of my mind lately, I’ve been rereading some of the Star Trek novels from my collection. I have a whole bookshelf that is nearly all Star Trek books. This takes up time I should be spending on writing, blogging and housework.

I’ve also been highly tempted to buy new Star Trek novels. I haven’t bought new ones in years. In part because since my father’s death in 2004 there has been no one to go to the bookstore with. And of the two most recent Trek novels I’ve bought, one was dreadful and the other was so-so. But still, I keep looking on Amazon and sooner or later I may buy.

Special Interests can cost an Aspie a good deal of money— money we mostly don’t have since Aspies have an 80% unemployment rate. One of the tough parts of riding a Special Interest is to say ‘no’ to buying special-interest-related items when the interest is very intense. When this happens I may feel intensely like I ‘need’ certain items— and have less sales resistance to buying them even when they cost too much and I don’t have money to spare.

One thing that helps me is to rate the Special Interest that triggers the desires. A brand-new Special Interest does not warrant purchases, because the interest may fade quickly and may not recur for years. With a lifelong Special Interest such as Star Trek, a few modest purchases may be justified.

Others are harder to figure. With my interest in languages the problem is that I like to try new languages, but don’t know how interested I will be in them in the future. So I go for free audio language lessons from Book2 with a new language and tell myself when I’ve completed the lessons then I can buy something related to that language.

As a writer there is one way to keep a Special Interest from becoming a distraction— use the Special Interest that is obsessing you in the story. Herman Melville did that when he wrote Moby Dick— he gave us a lot of information about whaling and the life at sea in the book.

Of course if you are writing an Amish romance, it may be difficult to work a science fictional Special Interest into the story. Your current interest may not be something you can incorporate into the story. But you might be able to use your Special Interest as a reward when you have completed your writing quotas for the day.

Another trick might be to try to reactivate a previous Special Interest which DOES fit your story. How might you do this? Well, here’s an example: I currently have one writing project which is set in Russia. The Russian language has been one of my Special Interests, on and off, since my late teens. Doing a little work with Russian language tapes or listening to online radio from Russia might ramp up that particular Special Interest, and that might keep my interest on the story a bit more.

The worst temptation for an Aspie Writer when the Special Interest bug bites is to drop the current writing project for a new, more compatible one. I almost did that a couple of days last month, when instead of working on my current project I did some planning/outlining for a starship-based science fiction story which was compatible with my Star Trek obsession. But today my plans are to be a good girl and work on my proper project— mainly doing planning/outlining since I didn’t do quite enough of that before beginning.

Question: do you have Special Interests or other obsessions which can be a distraction from your writing/blogging? How do you cope?

Nissa Annakindt: Poet, Aspie & cat person

I share what I know— be warned! My opinions on politics and religion are loudly proclaimed here from time to time. (‘Deplorable’ & Catholic, respectively. I also have Same-Sex Attraction, which I handle with chastity.)

I welcome civil comments but can’t always reply as I’m over-busy & also because I have an autism spectrum disorder and social interaction’s not what I’m good at.

Nissa Annakindt

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